How A Comedian With No Experience Got Such Huge Names To Join 'BoJack Horseman'

It may seem strange that "BoJack
Horseman," a cartoon featuring an alcoholic talking horse and
occasional bestiality, made it so big.

Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, a young comedian who had zero
experience in Hollywood, got former Disney CEO Michael Eisner's
Tornante Company to pick it up, signed on "Arrested Development"
favorite Will Arnett and Aaron Paul while he was filming
"Breaking Bad" to highlight an all-star cast, and sold the show
to Netflix as its first-ever animated project — and strangest of
all got his creative vision through the production almost
entirely intact.

How this happened came down to a good concept,
the creator's exceptional ability to communicate his vision, and
smart production companies in Tornante, animators ShadowMachine,
and Netflix.

"BoJack" tells the story of the washed-up star
of a 1990s sitcom who has a horse head on a human body and lives
in a
world of talking animals. The show is dark, funny, and smart,
with an unusually sophisticated story arc for a cartoon. It's
also got great music, fun animation, and tons of subtly hilarious animal
gags.

Netflix

Bob-Waksberg, around 26 years old in late 2010, was a
member of the loose comedy collective Olde English, and he was
looking to break into TV.

He got the idea for "BoJacK" based on drawings
by his friend Lisa Hanawalt along with his own sense of despair
in LA, as he told Business Insider:

I had just moved out to L.A. from New York, and
I didn't really know anybody and I was living up in this house in
the Hollywood Hills — it was a friend of a friend of a friend — I
was staying in this tiny bedroom that was really more of a closet
in this gigantic, gorgeous house, and I remember sitting on the
deck and looking over all of Hollywood and feeling like I was on
top of the world but also that I'd never been more lonely and
isolated. That gave me the idea of exploring this character who
had every success he could have wanted and still couldn't find a
way to be happy. I combined that melancholy with Lisa's cartoony
animal characters, and that was really the genesis of the
idea.

Netflix

Bob-Waksberg had a good idea but it was unusual, so he was
skeptical when his manager set up a meeting between him
and head of development Steve Cohen and head of production
Noel Bright at Tornante, and he didn't even bring up
"BoJack" until their third meeting.

But Cohen and Bright were
impressed from the start.

"We had read Raphael and were blown away
by his writing," Cohen said. "What is amazing about Raphael
as a writer is he writes in a million different voices with
different themes that really resonated, so when we read, we were
just absolutely blown away."

As for his horse show, Bob-Waksberg made a
compelling case when he finally got up the nerve.

"Raphael said I have this idea called 'BoJack
Horseman,' and he was probably ready to be met with ..." Cohen said,
trailing off. "But then he started talking and it really
resonated with Noel and I, just the way he spoke about it, with
such clarity, and frankly it is something that touches all of us.
What do you do when you have a little bit of success. What do you
do with the rest of your life."

Bob-Waksberg doesn't just write in a million
voices, he also talks in a million voices, telling stories in
long bursts filled with recreated dialogue. His description of
selling "BoJack" reads something like an episode of the
show:

The very first step was just a general meeting.
You go on a lot of those as a writer. You go in, you shake some
hands, you shmooze for a little bit. You have a couple stories
you tell at every general meeting, kind of like your first date
stories. Kind of like, "Oh, this is the deal with this, this is
where I come from, this is what I think about New York versus
LA." You kind of do your bit and that's it. That's always the
first step, and you go on a lot of general meetings, and usually
they don't lead to anything, so I went on this like, "Who are
these guys?" My manager was like, "Oh, no, Steve has read your
sample, he really loved it, he wanted some more of your writing,
he really loved that, he wanted to know everything about you." So
basically these guys had already read like everything I'd ever
written. My script, short stories, web comics, they'd seen my
earlier college sketch comedy, so they were experts before I even
came in. We had a nice time and then I left, and then I got a
call from my manager and he was like, "Those guys at Tornante
really loved you, they want to maybe work on something with you."
I was like, "Sure, I've heard that before." He was like, "They
want to set up another meeting with you." So I came in for
another meeting and they pitched something to me. They had some
property they were working on. They were like, "Oh, I think you
might be interested in this." I was like, "Oh, no, maybe," and
then my manager called me and was like, "Do you want to do that
thing?" and I was like, "Ehh, not really," and then he was like,
"Well, they really like you so they want to know what you want to
do," and I was like, "Oh great, now I've got to go to another
meeting with these guys." So we had another meeting, which was a
pitch meeting, and I pitched like five ideas and one of them was
BoJack Horseman and at the end of the meeting, Steve was like,
"Which of them are you most passionate about?" and I said, "Well,
I really like this horse idea," and he said, "That sounds great,
I'd love to see if you have any writing on that or anything else
on it." I was like, "Uhn, but I don't ... but OK." I went
home and my manager called and was like, "Those guys really loved
that BoJack Horseman idea, you should write up a treatment." I
was like, "I've got to write a treatment now?" Again thinking
none of this is ever going to lead to anything, it's all work I'm
going to do for nothing. But again I spent a couple weeks writing
this treatment, which was a five-page document with character
descriptions, a couple episode descriptions, I attached a bunch
of pictures from Lisa's website ... and I sent it to them and
then I got a call from my manager saying, 'Oh, they love the
document,' and they want you to meet Michael Eisner, and I was
like, "Now this is probably happening for real."

Netflix

Next up, Bob-Waksberg convinced Eisner, one of the most
powerful people in Hollywood, not only to buy the show but also
to allow it to go forward unchanged:

I was very intimidated, because for me I had
used to watch him growing up introducing the wonderful world of
Disney and I remember him from that, so for me it was a real
starstruck moment to meet him, but I did my song and dance, we
talked about the idea a little bit, and as I recall he was a
little nervous about the idea of a show business satire because
the general feeling is that's kind of done, but I talked about
why it's interesting to me and said I'm open to other angles on
it but that's how I want to do it and at the end of the
conversation he said, "Yeah, you seem like a smart guy, let's do
it your way." That's an amazing thing to hear from Michael
Eisner, so I was like, "OK, we're in business together, let's
make something."

TV shows typically get revised significantly
during development, but not "BoJack."

"That document that Raphael initially wrote,
those initial characters — I don't think we've changed a thing,"
Cohen said. "Most of those original story ideas and episode ideas
came right from the first page.

With Tornante on board, the next step was
developing a presentation to pitch the show to a network, a
process that took about a year. The team brought on Hanawalt to
work supervising director Mike Hollingsworth and the animators at
ShadowMachine. While they were fleshing out the world of
"BoJack," casting director Linda Lamontagne recruited an amazing
cast.

"We talked about who we saw as
all our characters, and I can tell you who we saw as our
characters is who we have as our cast today," Bright
said. "OK, will
Will Arnett really say yes to this? Yes, he said yes. Is Aaron
Paul really going to do this? He was still shooting 'Breaking
Bad.' Yes."

"For us just the prospect of a serialized narrative was something
new and different and I think the audience would agree it's
really satisfying when you see that thread evolve over a season
it's terribly exciting," ShadowMachine co-founder
Alex Bulkey said.

Even if "BoJack" was
perfect for Netflix, however, it was rumored that the company
wasn't buying animations. Again, Bob-Waksberg had to convince
people of his vision, and again he pulled it off.

"It was an hour-long pitch and Raphael sat
there with no notes and went through 12 episodes in such great
detail and for Noel and I to sit there and participate and just
watch this performance of the creator of the show, it was really
inspiring," Cohen said. "There was such clarity to each moment
and I think Netflix, obviously they bought it, but I think
executives there responded to the material in a way — they were
such champions of the material — that we couldn't be at a better
home."

Netflix

Working with Netflix was everything they hoped it would be.

"I would say Netflix was
hands-on in the best possible way," Bob-Waksberg said. "It's not
like Netflix said, 'OK, go do your thing, we'll see you in 12
months with a show.' They were very much on-board with it and
supported the whole way through. They didn't hamper us with notes
or overload us with notes. They really got what the show was and
was trying to be and they trusted us to make it. On every trip
they had notes and thoughts and on every radio play and
storyboard, they're very much involved and have a lot of input,
but they're not trying to dictate the show into being something
it isn't. You get the sense on some shows that the network buys
one show and they're really trying to make it into another show
and in this case it really felt like Netflix bought the show they
wanted and they supported us and empowered us to make it."

"We think of them as a
welcome partner," Bright said. "[F]rom the
moment we went in there, they've been enthusiastic about the show
and it has just built from every level up, from the people I
mentioned to everyone in the marketing, the PR department, the
social media department up to [Netflix Chief Content Officer] Ted
[Sarandos] himself. It's just been a phenomenal experience for
us, so having that's really important, knowing that we're setting
out to make something really unique."

With Netflix's support, the
"BoJack" team was free to develop a story that wouldn't have
worked anywhere else.

"The thing that’s so great and
so exciting about having a show on Netflix be a binge thing
is that
'BoJack', unlike other cartoons that I can think
of, is a linear story," Hollingsworth
told Cartoon Brew. "It
doesn’t reset at the beginning of every
episode like
'The
Simpsons' or
'Family
Guy'; his house and all
of his relationships are slowly destroyed throughout the season,
and that was a unique and fun thing. It seems like something they
might do in anime, but I can’t think of an American cartoon where
the world keeps evolving."

I am SO happy to be on Netflix. I honestly can't imagine
making this show anywhere else. The coolest thing about their
model to me, moreso even than the idea of people watching all
the episodes together, is the idea that people are going to
watch all the episodes IN ORDER. This is something I think we
as audiences take for granted, but you CAN'T take it for
granted when you're working on a show for a more traditional
network. Traditionally, every episode needs to work as an
entrance to the series even if you've never seen the show
before. But here, we got to know that nobody's going to watch
episode 7 unless they've already seen episodes 1-6, so we
didn't have to constantly reintroduce the characters and the
premise, AND we could have the characters and the premise
CHANGE. This influenced EVERYTHING we did, from background
stuff, like the burnt ottoman and the Hollywoo sign, to
setting up jokes and stories in early episodes (like Vanessa
Gekko, Dr. Hu, the Beast Buy receipt) that we knew would pay
off MUCH later.

Bob-Waksberg's unlikely
horse show was finally released on Aug. 22. While Netflix
doesn't release viewer data except for average star ratings —
the show got 3.9 out of 5 — all you need to know is that it
was picked up for a second season less than a week
later.Netflix went all out with
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